Politics lecturer charged with assaulting police officer

A University of Manchester academic was charged with assaulting a police officer last week. The arrest was made during the third national day of action against the planned cuts to higher education and the proposed rise in tuition fees.

Dr Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, an academic in the School of Social Sciences, was arrested following an altercation with a police officer and will appear in court on Tuesday.

In total, five arrests were made last Tuesday as approximately 1,500 students from universities and further education colleges marched through the city centre. A second man was also arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. Two further arrests were made for suspected public order offences and a fifth man was arrested for an alleged breach of the peace.

The march began at University Place, before moving to the city centre and then returned to the University of Manchester campus. Protesters then moved to the Roscoe building, where nearly 500 people filled the lecture hall.

Similar protests in London were largely peaceful. Metropolitan police reported 153 arrests. 146 of those arrests were attributed to one group who refused to leave Trafalgar Square after the protests.

Demonstrations also took place in Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and Oxford.
A vote in the House of Commons on December 9 will decide the future of tuition fee rises and cuts to higher education. The National Union of Students (NUS) has called for mass demonstrations across the country on December 8.

The NUS also stated that, if the vote passes, they plan to organise a vigil to light 9,000 candles to represent the potential £9,000 tuition fees that students will face.

NUS president Aaron Porter said: “MPs can be left in no doubt as to the widespread public opposition to these plans or of the consequences of steamrollering them through parliament.

“For the third time in less than a month, thousands of students have taken to the streets to protest against the government’s attacks on further and higher education.

“Despite repeated dismissals by Nick Clegg that these are uninformed protesters, students are intelligent, articulate people who are not being listened to by those in whom they placed their hope for a different politics,” added Porter.

Porter had previously apologised for the NUS being “spineless” about supporting student protests and labeled his own actions as “dithering.”